Topband: Long Beverages and distant feed points

[N7DF]

When I lived outside Holton, Kansas in the 1980s, I had a pair of 2 wire beverages, each 2 wavelengths long on 160 meters, situated in an 80 acre field with the common feed point 1000 feet from the station.  They were fed through a home made two core transformer with CATV RG 59 coax (I got a 1000 foot roll for $15 from a hardware store going out of business)
 
A 12VDC, DPDT relay powered through the coax switched them in NE or SE direction.  They worked so well that hams 75 miles distant in Kansas City swore that I was making up all the stations I could hear and they couldn't.  I never did need a preamplifier.  Sometimes the signal on a beverage was actually louder than on my N-S oriented inverted vee at 110 feet.
 
On several occasions I was able to replace a European station on the NE antenna with a Caribbean station on the SE antenna with no QRM between them.  Their orientation was 45 degrees and 135 degrees, magnetic.
 
Over a period of several months I was able to graph the patterns by comparing the signal on the beverage to the signal on my vertical, then drawing a line on a map through my location to the QTH of the station I was receiving  and plotting relative signal strengths on the line.  Both of them had very narrow beamwidths.  Unfortunately, over the years and - several overseas moves - I have lost the data sheets and graphs.
 
One interesting thing was that I could copy ignition noise from cars going past on a highway two miles away and tell which way they were travelling by how they faded out on one antenna and then came in on the other one.  I could also estimate their speed and a lot of them were driving well over the 55MPH limit in effect at the time.
 
I had to be careful with the shield of the coax because it would arc over inside the shack during thunderstorms if I didn't have it grounded out.  Once it started a grass fire and burnt up about 100 feet of the coax where it was lying on the ground.